A Defender of Justice

My brother Dennis decided to
come in from the cold of his own contradicted life. He returned to the United
States, and came at once to see me in Boston. He had learned that, after his
refusal to report for induction, his draft board had referred his case to the
U.S. attorney. But because of the backlog of such cases, he had yet to be
formally indicted. He had returned to America prepared to go to jail, but I
encouraged the impulse he also had to apply for conscientious-objector status.
He had refused to do that in the first place because, at the time, one could do
so only by appealing to religious convictions, narrowly defined. Dennis would
not pretend to be religious. To him, the war was wrong whether God existed or
not.

Such restricted notions of "religious" had now loosened somewhat. I knew there
were precedents for an appeal to "mere" ethical conviction as a basis for
conscientious objection. If his application was rejected, he intended again to
refuse to serve. This time he would go to jail. Without revealing his
whereabouts, he contacted the Selective Service. He was told to report for a
hearing in Washington, and advised to come accompanied by an attorney. An
appeals board would decide whether to seek an indictment; if no indictment was
called for, the board would reorder his induction or recommend him for CO
status.

Meanwhile, I used my contacts to find a lawyer. That was when Dennis stunned
me. He had not been in direct communication with our parents in nearly two
years, yet he said that he intended to ask Dad to be his lawyer.

"You can't do that," I said. "Dad would never help you, and it would only be
cruel to ask him." As it was cruel, I might have added, of Dad to ask me to
offer a blessing at Hoover's dinner.

"He went to law school," Dennis said. "He was admitted to the bar. He's a
lawyer."

"He's also ashamed of you. Believe me, I know. He hates what you've done."

Dennis shrugged, not answering with the question that hung above us both: But
does he hate me?

I remember how angry I became at Dennis. His plan struck me as
passive-aggressive, almost sadistic, guaranteed to escalate the insult and bad
feelings between him and Dad. I knew so little. I have referred to my father in
the period after his retirement as an almost entirely broken man. I used the
word "almost" because something vital and courageous and large-hearted had
remained intact in him. He drew on it in response to Dennis, agreeing to
represent him before the appeals board.

He took the project very seriously. He studied the law and then met with
Dennis, to advise him as he prepared his own statement. When the day of the
Selective Service hearing arrived, Dad appeared wearing his uniform, one of the
few times he did so in retirement. His three stars matched those of General
Lewis Hershey, the infamous long-time Selective Service director. When Dad and
Dennis entered the hearing room, the board members were seated on the far side
of a long table. Our father introduced Dennis, but the chairman, struck by the
uniform, wanted only to hear from the general. He asked Dennis to step outside.
Dad looked at Dennis, then said, "My son has a statement to make."

With that, the board sat through Dennis's reading of his long, painstakingly
composed declaration of conscience. I had read it, and found it to be a clear
and forthright definition of the war's immorality and of a citizen's obligation
to oppose it. When Dennis finished, the chairman asked him again to wait
outside. Dennis left the room.

It was perhaps the next Christmas when I visited my parents, and we went to
midnight Mass at St. Paul's College. By then I could not worship at the Bolling
chapel. After Mass, I was sitting in the Paulist common room when an elderly
priest asked my father about his defense of my brother. Unaware that I was
listening, he described it. The chairman of the appeals board acknowledged that
he knew who Dad was, and asked for his view. Citing the law, Dad explained why
his son's position -- not just then, but in the first place -- was proper and
legal. "The right to conscientious objection," he said, "is basic to the
American idea." The board's task, as he saw it, was only to determine if the
application for exemption from military service was authentically based on
conscience. "I am here today," he went on, "not because I agree with what my
son just said -- obviously, wearing this uniform, I don't -- but because I know
with absolute certitude that his position is sincerely held, prudently arrived
at, and an act, if I might add, of heroic integrity."

The chairman eyed his fellow board members, whose simple nods said it all. He
gaveled the hearing to a close. Dennis was granted his CO status. He did a
year's alternative service, as an orderly in a mental hospital.

The priest to whom my father told all this was a World War II combat veteran
whose wounds had left the right side of his face frozen. His right eye would
often fill up and overflow. Tears would stream down his one cheek without his
being aware of it. That happened now. He said to my father, "General, I think
it was big of you to support your son, but frankly, I don't think your boy's
attitude does him much credit." .

"I suppose I should agree with you," my father replied. "I share your
instincts. I've spent my whole life defending our point of view. But I don't
think you understand my son's position well enough to see the point he has. All
I know for sure is this: if human beings don't drastically change the way they
resolve their conflicts, we won't survive this century." Then, after a pause,
still unaware of me, my father added, "My son Dennis certainly represents a
drastic change from the way we were brought up. And that may be just the change
we need."

There was a thin glistening on the priest's cheek as he listened to my father.
I had to remind myself that his tears signified no particular emotion. Unlike
mine. It wasn't only that I envied Dennis, confronting as I had to, yet again,
how little I knew of my father's true capacity. It was also that I saw Dad, for
the first time, as a "child-changed father," in the phrase Cordelia used of
Lear. Dennis had touched him in that dark corner of the self on the walls of
which his worst fear was scrawled.

And what was that but the fear of nuclear war? When Dad had first encountered
the real risk of Armageddon, perhaps in meetings with our Bolling neighbor
Curtis LeMay, perhaps in Wiesbaden while Nikita Khrushchev pawed at Berlin, or
perhaps during the Cuban missile crisis when the Chiefs wanted to attack, how
could that misfit general have ever imagined that a glimpse of the way out of
this dead end would come from his lost-soul son?